Public Sector Mapping Agreement

From central government departments to town and parish councils and from the emergency services to NHS Trusts, nearly every public sector organisation in England and Wales can become a member of the PSMA and experience the benefits of using OS digital map products.

How does the PSMA help your organisation?

The Public Sector Mapping Agreement (PSMA) is a collective agreement between OS and the government. Its licence lets you access and share OS digital mapping. This helps you make better decisions to save money and boost efficiency.

From central government departments to town and parish councils and from the emergency services to NHS Trusts, nearly every public sector organisation in England and Wales can become a member of the PSMA and experience the benefits of using OS digital map products.

Get mapping that will change the way you work.Using our data can help save lives by showing emergency services the best routes to incidents. It enables managers make better informed decisions. And it lets customer service teams work smarter.

Share data with other organisations that belong to the PSMA. Pooling intelligence helps police forces tackle crime together. Partnerships between local councils, schools and the NHS are key to tackling issues like childhood obesity and teenage pregnancies.

Share data with contractors such as waste service providers. All you need to ask them to do is sign one of the PSMA Contractor Licences.

Work with colleagues in the wider PSMA community. Start exploring common areas of interest and share information with colleagues in similar organisations.

Get support from our dedicated helpdesk. Our friendly customer service staff are just a call or email away.

Access data across your organisation. You can give colleagues in your organisation access to order and download OS data, while being able to control what each person can do.

Who can join?

If you are not already a member, to join the growing number of over 4,500 organisations that are, you to need to be one that qualifies under the Public Contracts Regulations 2015 as being a ‘contracting authority’.

Note: Commissioning Support Units (CSUs) cannot join the PSMA in their own right. But they can support CCGs and NHS England with mapping through the PSMA contractor licence. Where a CSU provides mapping services to multiple CCGs, they could benefit from one of the other contractor licences available from Ordnance Survey.

Note: Contributing members of UK Search and Rescue can become members. Other search and rescue organisations can receive data either informally or under a contractual relationship with a PSMA member, and may not be eligible to join in their own right. Learn more

In addition to those not specifically defined or named in the regulations, there are other public organisations that could become members.

For example, when an application is reviewed, one of the most commonly looked at areas is “bodies governed by public law”. The Regulations defined this as meaning bodies that have all of the following characteristics:-

they are established for the specific purpose of meeting needs in the general interest, not having an industrial or commercial character;

they have legal personality; and

they have any of the following characteristics:

they are financed, for the most part, by the State, regional or local authorities, or by other bodies governed by public law;

they are subject to management supervision by those authorities or bodies; or

they have an administrative, managerial or supervisory board, more than half of whose members are appointed by the State, regional or local authorities, or by other bodies governed by public law;

In these circumstances, the applicant would be asked to provide documentary evidence of how:

The terms of the PSMA does allow for OS and BEIS to agree to allow certain other bodies to become members for example, where it is in the national interest. Under this heading, it has been agreed that the contributing members of the UK Search and Rescue (UK SAR) have been able to join the PSMA. See this information on how associate search and rescue members can get access.

Does my organisation already belong?

Alternatively, download our list of PSMA and OSMA member organisations (XLSX format or CSV format), last updated 31 October 2018. In Excel or equivalent, speed up your search using the Find in file tool (Ctrl + F5).

If your organisation is listed, please talk to your PSMA Principal Contact about your data needs. If you don't know who this is, contact us and we'll pass on your details.